Friday, February 11, 2005

How much hardware do you have?

If you’ve been gaming for any length of time, the amount of hardware that you accumulate can be scary. I have been trying to reduce the clutter in the main closet, tallying items that can be tossed out and so forth. I’ve been told that if you haven’t used an item for a year or longer, you probably wouldn’t miss it. That rule of thumb works for some things, but it’s certainly not a great blanket rule. “I haven’t looked at my baby pictures for years, toss them!”

So anyway, I counted a little over 14 different gaming consoles in my possession and that’s not counting duplicates (for some reason I have two NES systems, bwuh?). This is EXACTLY why more people aren’t regular/lifelong gamers. You have to have so much hardware to continually play games. Granted, I could have shed more of these way back when, but there are so many games I want to have on hand, timeless classics if you will. Think of it in movie terms; would you get rid of older movies just because they are older? Of course not. Visually, most games don’t age well at all so it’s not a true apples to apples comparison.

The trickiest part of this next phase of “Project clean” is figuring out which items I’m keeping simply out of nostalgia or games I realistically will still play. Considering I have enough games released in 2004 to keep me busy for the rest of the year or longer, it’s going to be hard to argue keeping as many as I have.

It hasn’t been too hard to resist splurging on new game purchases until full time work is obtained. Nothing has come out recently that I need to have right now anyway. Next week though, WarioWare Touched will be purchased and Tekken 5 the week after that for sure. After some night sweats, I managed to avoid buying Death by Degrees. Yes, it’s obviously pretty crap, but Nina has been known to have her way. My dignity wins out this time.

Informal poll: How many consoles, home or portable do you have? Avergae number of games per system? Post in comments.

3 comments:

Hold on, stream-of-conscious tally: Currently in the house are the Dreamcast, GBA (x2), Game Boy Color, Nintendo DS, Saturn, PS, PS2, Xbox (x2 for some reason), GameCube. If you the count the closet in mom's house, there's still a Genesis (with 32X and Sega CD), Super NES, Turbo Duo, Lynx (x2), Game Gear, and a Nomad. No NES. Weird, huh? So here right now: 9 (11 if you count doubles). Adding in the ones at mom's house, that's 17 (if you count the 32X and Sega CD separately) or 18 if you count doubles.